News for the public, not the powerful.

Will Missouri Republicans Defy Their Own Supreme Court to Keep a Rigged Map?

Missouri’s redistricting war just went from ugly to lawless. Last year, at Donald Trump’s urging, Republicans carved up Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City district to hand the GOP a 7 to 1 edge. That map already ran the August primary. Then last week the state’s own Supreme Court unanimously threw it out for November, restored the old lines, and sent it to voters as a referendum. Attorney General Catherine Hanaway lost her bid to pause that ruling, so she raced to Washington with an emergency appeal. And her own brief tells the justices that county election officials are now left to make their own decisions on whether to follow the state court or keep using the Republican map. Political reporter Mark Maxwell says that’s a signal officials could simply defy the court, “which would be absolute chaos.” A lawyer for People Not Politicians calls it open defiance. Candidates don’t know which district they’re running in. Cleaver, who’s represented Kansas City for 20 years, says he has no idea where he’ll land. The U.S. Supreme Court could act within days, with control of the House on the line. When a party treats court rulings as optional whenever it loses, that’s not redistricting. It’s the end of the rule of law.

Gulf Nations Build Walls Against Iran as Trump’s War Grinds On

Across the Persian Gulf, America’s allies have stopped waiting for Washington to finish this war. They’re building their own defenses and their own escape routes around the Strait of Hormuz. Officials gathered at the Hili Forum in Abu Dhabi this week said the region can’t keep living in a state of neither war nor peace. The UAE’s top diplomatic adviser, Anwar Gargash, put it plainly. He said “geography gives us no alternative to engagement” with Iran. Here’s what that looks like on the ground. The UAE has rushed a $3 billion pipeline to Fujairah, on the far side of the strait, and wants it online by mid 2027. Saudi Arabia is pushing oil to the Red Sea, where Iran’s Houthi allies are now attacking tankers. Iraq is working on pipelines through Turkey and Syria. And Gulf states are shopping for radar and missile defense systems, trying to knit their air defenses into one network. One Gulf official told reporters they’re Iran-proofing their economies. Think about what that means. The countries closest to this fight have concluded it won’t end soon, and they’re spending billions to live with it. That’s the bill for Trump’s war, and Americans are paying it at the gas pump and will continue too...

Who Gutted the Food Inspectors While Your Grocery Bill Kept Climbing?

The average American family now spends more than 10,000 dollars a year on groceries. Prices are up more than 18% since 2022, and two-thirds of Americans say they’re paying too much. Now Axios reports the food you’re overpaying for is getting less safe to eat. The FDA just hit a record 19 outbreak investigations running at the same time, covering everything from infant formula to jalapeños. Why? Because the Trump administration pushed out thousands of workers at the CDC, the FDA and the USDA, and federal officials admitted they’d do fewer inspections. Cornell economist Christopher Barrett says the idea that those cuts won’t hurt food safety is demonstrably false. When inspectors stop showing up, more contaminated product goes out the door, and companies pass the cost of recalls right back to you. Food and Water Watch analyst Lauren Borsheim says the administration “has really just dismantled many of the fundamental protections” that keep our food safe. Add corporate consolidation, where one supplier’s mistake becomes a multistate panic, like the Cyclospora outbreak tied to iceberg lettuce, and you’ve got a system built to fail. Inflation makes groceries hard to afford. Gutting the watchdogs makes them hard to trust. Working families are getting hit from all sides.

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Did a GOP Senator Have His Own Patients Thrown in Jail Over Medical Bills?

Kansas Senator Roger Marshall spent 25 years as an obstetrician and brags on his website about his passion for the sanctity of life. Now the New York Times has gone through Kansas court records and found that Marshall sued more than 700 of his own patients over unpaid bills, some as small as 101 dollars. Eighty-one of them were arrested. Joe Vasquez and his wife were hauled off over Easter weekend in 2007, as they got ready for an egg hunt with their grandkids, over a $4,561 bill from her emergency hysterectomy. They spent two days in jail before relatives scraped together bail. Meischa Zimmerman owed $3,596 for an emergency C-section. It ballooned past $7,000. She was arrested in front of her 2-year-old. She said, “I asked them quietly, can you not handcuff me in front of my daughter?” Marshall’s worth up to $9.8 million. His spokeswoman says judges issue warrants, not doctors. Tell that to the mother who had to choose between her electric bill and $50 a month to a doctor who didn’t need it. This is what happens when we treat health care as a business instead of a right.

Why Are Thousands of “Affordable” Apartments Sitting Empty While People Sleep in Shelters?

Mathew Davis lives in a homeless shelter in Austin, Texas. He earns a few hundred dollars a month donating blood plasma. Even a $450 a month tiny home with no running water is out of reach. Meanwhile, more than 4,500 units Austin calls affordable, nearly 16 percent of them, sit empty. Here’s why. The federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit pays developers to keep rents low, but most of those units go to people earning 50 or 60 percent of the area’s median income. In Portland, a 60 percent unit rents for $1,444, barely below the $1,581 market rate. So the working poor skip the paperwork and rent market rate, and the poorest can’t afford either. Austin promised 20,000 units for its poorest residents. It built 543. Davis says, “I want to shut the door at night and be able to sleep.” There are 11 million extremely low-income renter households in America and only four million units they can afford. We’re subsidizing developers to build apartments nobody in a shelter can rent. That’s not a housing policy. That’s a giveaway with a nicer name.

Police Panic Over Meta Glasses That Let the Public Watch Them Back

And finally, the surveillance state has discovered it doesn’t like being surveilled. The Guardian obtained a dozen memos showing police from Maine to California are worried about Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, the ones with tiny cameras and microphones. In January, the NYPD’s counterterrorism unit called them a security and counterintelligence threat and ordered officers to inspect all eyewear allowed in jail cells, after videos shot inside police facilities showed up on social media. Maine’s Homeland Security fusion center warned in June that the glasses can run facial recognition and could be used to dox officers. Similar memos came from fusion centers in San Diego, Tennessee, Virginia and New York. And in August, ICE banned its own employees from wearing them in federal workspaces, calling them the equivalent of body cameras. Ryan Shapiro of the transparency group Property of the People, which obtained the documents, put it perfectly. “When only the government is allowed to hold the camera, that’s not security.” That, he said, is impunity. These agencies run facial recognition on all of us every day. Turns out they only object to a camera when it’s pointed at them.

And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, September 8, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Trump’s Iran War Is Draining $1 Million From Our Wallets Every Two Minutes

Brown University has put a running meter on Trump’s war with Iran, and it just crossed $100 billion. That’s the extra money Americans have paid for gasoline and diesel since the bombing started on February 28. It’s climbing $1 million every two minutes. Diesel hit a record Friday, kept rising, and reached $5.90 a gallon Monday. That’s up 60% from a year ago, and every truckload of food and freight rides on diesel. Now oil is racing back toward $100 a barrel after the US struck three Iranian tankers and someone hit a Saudi refinery. Brown puts it plainly, these costs “come directly out of Americans’ pockets.” Trump promised cheap gas. Instead he bought a war and now you have the bill.

AfD Wins Historic Landslide and Rocks Germany’s Chancellor to His Foundations

Germany’s far right just did something no party like it has done since World War Two. The AfD took 44% of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, winning 39 of 83 seats and falling three short of an absolute majority. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives collapsed to 17%, their worst defeat in decades. Merz called it a result “we cannot simply move past as if nothing happened.” Nearly 60% of voters there backed parties that question Germany’s democratic rules. German intelligence has labeled the state AfD chapter a confirmed right wing extremist group. Its lead candidate campaigned on friendship with both the White House and the Kremlin, and JD Vance has cheered the party on. Remember, Germany built its postwar democracy to stop this. The firewall is cracking, and Trump’s MAGA people are holding the hammer.

Did Canada Just Hit Back at Trump With 50 Percent Tariffs?

At one minute past midnight this morning, Canada’s retaliation kicked in. Prime Minister Mark Carney slapped tariffs of up to 50% on $20 billion worth of American goods, from steel to cheese to raincoats. It matches the batch of 50% tariffs Trump hit Canada with last month after talks collapsed. Trump’s response? He threatened to ban Bombardier jets unless the company builds them here, vowed to double auto tariffs to 50% in January, and renamed Lake Ontario Lake America. Carney’s answer was short. “This lake is called Lake Ontario, today and forever.” Republican Susan Collins is already warning that businesses in border states will get crushed. Canada is the top export market for 36 American states. Trump is picking a fight with the customer next door, and your job might be the collateral.

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Will the Pentagon Stiff a War Widow Because Congress Never Said the Word War?

Major Alex Klinner was 33 years old. He died in March when his KC-135 refueling plane went down over western Iraq while supporting strikes on Iran. His widow, Libby, went public last week after the Air Force told her she’s ineligible for certain combat death benefits because Congress never formally declared war. She told the AP, “My husband lost his life because we’re in a war.” Eighteen American service members have now died and 780 have been wounded in this conflict. Asked about her case, JD Vance said the administration loves her and takes its commitment seriously, then insisted it isn’t a war because nobody’s actively shooting. Trump backed him up and called the whole thing small potatoes. Small potatoes. These families buried their loved ones. Now Washington is hiding behind a technicality to shortchange them. They are cowards and this is just wrong.

Has Trump’s Trade War Turned America’s Oldest Allies Into Its Angriest Critics?

Europe is watching the Canada fight closely, and it’s not happy. The European Union already swallowed a deal with Trump that locked in American tariffs and delivered none of the certainty it was promised. A former Italian prime minister shared Carney’s defiant speech and wrote, “Here is a speech I would like to hear in Europe.” Economists across the spectrum agree these tariffs raise prices for Americans while punishing the friends we’ll need in the next crisis. A Pew survey this summer found just 23% of adults worldwide have confidence in Trump, with the steepest drops among our closest allies, Germany and Canada. Trade wars are supposed to make the other guy blink. Instead this one is uniting the world against us, and the price shows up on your receipt.

Why Did Trump Order 660 Million Pounds of Mystery Meat From Melania’s Friend?

Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation, is telling Americans to stay away from the 660 million pounds of tariff free ground beef Trump ordered, supposedly to cut prices. It’s frozen chunks that may have sat overseas for years. Beef from Uruguay and Argentina has tested positive for a parasite drug and a banned antibiotic. And Brazil had police raid nearly 200 plants for selling rotten meat. Why? Schlosser points to a White House meeting with JBS owner Joesley Batista, jailed in Brazil for bribing 2,000 politicians. Schlosser writes Batista got the meeting “because of his friendship with Melania Trump.” Weeks later the SEC approved JBS for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The FDA is juggling a record 19 outbreak investigations after Trump gutted inspectors. Groceries cost 18% more than in 2022, and now you can’t trust them.

And that’s the way it is, Today is Tuesday, September 8, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Did Trump’s War Just Hand America The Highest Diesel Price In History?

Diesel hit $5.85 a gallon on Friday. That’s the highest price ever recorded in this country, beating the old record set in June of 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. Diesel is up nearly 60% from a year ago, and it’s the fuel that moves everything you buy. Regular gas hit $4.15, up from $3.20 last year, and AAA says gas has never been above $4 on Labor Day. What changed? Trump and Israel started bombing Iran in late February, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, and crude shot into the $90 range. Brown University figures the war has already cost the average household more than $741 in fuel alone. Some businesses are already tacking fees onto online orders and packages, and grocers say produce and meat get hit first. Trump told a rally you should happily pay “a tiny little bit more for your gasoline.” JD Vance said be grateful it isn’t worse. Economist Dean Baker put it simply. Trump did it. Every grocery bill in America now carries the cost of a war nobody voted for.

Is Trump’s Iran War Turning Into America’s Next Forever War?

Leon Panetta ran the Pentagon and the CIA under Barack Obama. And this weekend he told the Guardian that Trump’s war with Iran, now more than six months old, is likely to grind on for another six months with no resolution in sight. He compared it to Iraq and Afghanistan, calling it another failed war in the Middle East. Panetta spoke just days after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll abruptly quit amid reports he’d clashed with Pete Hegseth over a wave of firings. Panetta warned that adversaries are watching the turmoil at the Pentagon and “see weakness in terms of our ability” to defend the country. He also pointed to the USS Abraham Lincoln, which finally pulled into port in Thailand after more than 260 days at sea without a single port visit, amid reports of crumbling morale on board. His bottom line? You don’t deploy people endlessly into a war zone without a rotation plan. Most Americans, he says, now call it a mistake. When the man who ran the bin Laden raid says you’re losing, you’re losing.

Why Is Xi Jinping Suddenly Racing Around The World Before His Trump Dinner?

Xi Jinping barely leaves China. Before this month, his only foreign trip all year was a June visit to North Korea, his first in seven years. Now he’s on his busiest stretch of foreign travel in more than seven years. He was in Kyrgyzstan last weekend for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. Then Cairo, where the Egyptian president greeted him on September 1. Next comes a likely BRICS summit hosted by India’s Narendra Modi. And on September 24 he lands in Washington for a state dinner with Donald Trump, the return leg of Trump’s Beijing visit in May. The pitch Xi is making at every stop is simple. China is the stable one. China honors its agreements. America under Trump starts wars, slaps tariffs on its friends, and renames lakes out of spite. It’s a sales job, and it’s landing, because Trump keeps writing the ad copy for him. For 80 years American leadership rested on being predictable. Trump threw that away, and Beijing is picking it up off the floor.

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Have Voters Just Delivered Trump The Worst Party ID Numbers Since 2008?

Gallup’s latest quarterly numbers are out, and they’re brutal for Republicans. Forty-nine percent of Americans now say they’re Democrats or lean Democratic. Just 39% say Republican. That’s a 10 point Democratic edge. Compare that to the fourth quarter of 2024, the quarter Trump won and Republicans swept Congress, when Republicans led by 4 points. That’s a 14 point swing in less than two years. The New York Times says it’s the biggest Democratic advantage since 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected. The movement isn’t coming from people suddenly registering as Democrats. It’s coming from independents, now a record 455 of the electorate, who are asked which way they lean and increasingly answer, not Republican. Trump took office in January 2025 with a 52% approval rating. He’s spent it on a war, record gas prices, and a trade war with our closest neighbor. Party identification is the tide the midterms float on. With November two months away, the tide is running hard against the people in power.

Did Trump Just Turn America’s Best Friend Into An Enemy?

A new Leger poll out this weekend finds 41% of Canadians now call the United States an enemy country. Only 22% call us an ally. In June of 2025 the enemy number was 26%. Up 15 points. Why? Trump’s tariffs, which 63%of Canadians expect to hit their own wallets. Trump’s endless talk of a 51st state, which 85% of Canadians reject outright. Trump renaming Lake Ontario, Lake America. Trump declaring last weekend that he doesn’t want Canadian cars, parts, or anything. And 74%of Canadians back their government hitting back with retaliatory tariffs, even knowing it’ll cost them. But here’s the tell. Sixty-four percent say their view of America would change if Trump were no longer president. Leger’s Andrew Enns said “he can move public opinion like nobody’s business.” Canadians don’t hate America. They hate what one man is doing to it. Two centuries of friendship, the longest undefended border on Earth, and Trump lit it on fire over a tariff tantrum.

Who Speaks For Public Health When The CDC Goes Silent?

Every fall, the CDC runs a campaign telling Americans to get their flu, COVID, and RSV shots. This year, nothing. With flu season weeks away and updated vaccines on pharmacy shelves, the Trump administration under Robert F. Kennedy Junior hasn’t said a word. So the doctors did it themselves. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America all released their own vaccine guidelines this week. Dr. Sandra Fryhofer of the AMA said there’s been “a lot of confusion and chaos regarding vaccine recommendations.” Flu shots cut hospitalizations among seniors by 31%and deaths among children by 80%. RSV vaccines cut hospitalizations by up to 83% for people over 60. Pediatricians say they still don’t know whether the Vaccines for Children program will cover the shots for families who can’t afford them. When the government that’s supposed to protect you goes quiet on purpose, it’s not neutrality. It’s a choice, and kids pay for it.

Crazy Alert. Trump Floats Renaming New Mexico. Is “New America” Next?

Donald Trump isn’t done with the map. On Sunday he posted on Truth Social a picture of New Mexico with the word Mexico crossed out in red and replaced with America. New America. Probably a troll. With this president, who can tell? It comes a month after he signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario, Lake America, in retaliation for a collapsed trade deal with Canada. Google and Apple changed their maps. A Reuters Ipsos poll found just 14%of Americans liked the idea. The Trump Store is selling $55 Lake America hats anyway. He posted a video of machine gun toting Canadian geese guarding the lake, which he called “Donald Ducks.” He posted an AI clip of himself kicking over a Lake Ontario sign and doing the YMCA dance. Diesel’s at a record, the war’s a stalemate, our neighbors call us the enemy, and the president is spending his Sunday doodling on maps. That’s a man with a Sharpie and nothing better to do.

And that’s the way it is, Today is Monday, September 7, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Is the Planet About to Get Supersized Heat It Can’t Handle?

The United Nations just dropped a warning that should stop you cold. El Niño is supersizing right in front of our eyes. That’s not my language, that’s UN Secretary General António Guterres. He says the science leaves no room for doubt. The planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up fast. Forecasters say this El Niño could be the biggest in at least a 1,000 years, stacking on top of a planet already cooking from decades of fossil fuel pollution. The result? 2027 is on track to blow apart every heat record we’ve got. We’re already seeing the damage. Wildfires tearing through Indonesia. Monsoon rains weakening over India. The World Food Programme says this could push 50 million more people into hunger. This isn’t a distant problem. It’s happening now, to real families, while the fossil fuel industry keeps cashing checks.

Can the World Really Say There’s No Good Outcome Left?

As if that wasn’t enough, the UN Environment Programme just told us flat out, there are no good outcomes above one point five degrees of warming. And we’re going to blow past that mark. Even in the rosiest scenario, global heating hits at least one point eight degrees. The report says overshooting the Paris Agreement target is now unavoidable, possibly within just a few years. Glaciers could lose a quarter of their mass by twenty one hundred. Sea levels could climb 13 centimeters. Global food production could drop up to 14% by 2025. The president of Palau called this a fork in the road moment for the planet. Scientists say we can still get back to 1.5, but only with deep, immediate emissions cuts and pulling carbon from the sky. That takes political will our leaders in Washington have shown zero interest in finding.

Have Scientists Finally Caught a Glimpse of Dark Matter?

Now to something stranger, and honestly kind of thrilling. Scientists working nearly a mile underground in South Dakota say they may have caught the first real hint of dark matter, the invisible stuff that makes up most of the matter in our universe, stuff we’ve never seen, only inferred from its gravity. Researchers at the Sanford Underground Research Facility recorded a single strange particle interaction using ten tons of liquid xenon. Physicist Sam Eriksen of the University of Bristol says it could be the first hint of a dark matter observation. Other scientists urge caution, we’ve chased false alarms before. But if it holds up, it would be the first time humanity has actually seen the material that holds galaxies together. Sometimes the universe’s biggest mysteries crack open a millimeter at a time.

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Is Your Desk Chair Quietly Raising Your Cancer Risk?

Here’s one that hits close to home for anyone stuck behind a screen all day. A massive study out of the University of Glasgow followed over 91,000 people for more than 12 years. The finding? Every extra hour of sitting in one long, uninterrupted stretch raised the risk of dying from cancer by 9%. It wasn’t just how much you sit total, it was sitting still without moving. The good news, breaking that time up with light movement made a real difference. Swapping just one hour of prolonged sitting for light activity cut cancer death risk by 12%. Researchers say the fix doesn’t need a gym membership, just getting up, stretching, walking to the kitchen. For millions of Americans stuck at desks with no paid breaks, this is a workplace fairness issue too, not just a health one.

Could Your Career Be the Real Secret to a Sharp Mind?

Here’s some hope if you’ve spent your life grinding through a demanding job. New research out of Italy found people who spent decades in challenging careers, stayed in school longer, or kept up mentally tough hobbies held onto sharper memories in old age. Researchers at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati studied 45 older adults and found this trait, cognitive reserve, predicted memory accuracy no matter how hard the test got. Here’s the twist. Emotional intelligence showed no connection to memory accuracy at all. It only changed how fast people reacted to a happy face, and even that flipped depending on the task. So keep learning something hard. Your brain doesn’t care how emotionally in tune you are, it cares whether you keep using it.

Geeky Science Alert. Can Ripping Out Your Lawn Save the Planet, One Yard at a Time?

We’ll close on something you can go do this weekend. James Reed McGuire and Crystal Fritz moved from Chicago to Highland Park, Illinois, and decided their lawn was doing nothing for the planet. So they ripped it out. McGuire, a dedicated birder, couldn’t stand turf grass that gave nothing back to nature. Their first attempts were a mess, scattering wildflower seeds with no plan and digging up sod by hand. But they kept learning, kept planting native species, and now their yard is a certified wildlife habitat crawling with foxes, rabbits, butterflies, and birds. Neighbors stop to ask questions. Kids stop to stare. Turns out this couple joined a nationwide movement of Americans deciding the manicured lawn isn’t worth the water, the chemicals, or the silence it leaves behind.

And that’s the way it is, Today Friday, September 4th. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Did ICE Just Confess to Hiring Whoever Showed Up?

A career ICE official just blew the whistle on his own agency, and what he described should scare every American. This man spent seventeen years at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He knows how the place is supposed to run. He told the New York Times that ICE deliberately gutted its hiring standards to slam thousands of new agents into the field. Recruits got job offers before fingerprint checks came back. Before identity checks came back. Before credit checks came back. Political appointees skipped background investigations altogether. Training got chopped from ten weeks down to six. The whistleblower filed a formal complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general last August, and it’s now part of an active audit. He put it simply. “We chose as an agency to be more convenient rather than thorough,” he said. This isn’t a paperwork problem. These are the people showing up at your door with guns and the legal authority to use them. Senators are already demanding DHS explain why recruits with failed drug tests and pending criminal charges got sent out on the street. When a nation lowers the bar for who gets to carry a badge, it isn’t protecting anyone. It’s building a force that answers to no one but itself.

Hegseth Bets America’s Troops on a War with No End

Pete Hegseth told the country the Iran war would be quick. Six months later, he’s quietly signing paperwork that says otherwise. The Wall Street Journal reports the Pentagon chief is extending deployments of American troops, fighter squadrons and warships across the Middle East all the way into 2027. Right now there are fifty thousand American troops sitting in that region. Elements of the Army’s 82nd Airborne could stay there deep into next year. Nineteen warships. Air defense units. A maintenance backlog the military itself says could take years to unwind. Letters sent to military families admit as much, with one acknowledging that a longer tour weighs heavily on every household. Meanwhile Trump is privately floating the idea of just declaring the war over, even while the bombing continues. So which is it? Is this war winding down, or is Hegseth locking in another year and a half of it? Families deserve a straight answer, and so do the troops standing watch in the Strait of Hormuz while their commander in chief tries to figure out how to spin an exit. Wars that drag on quietly are still wars. They just get easier for Washington to ignore.

Robert Reich Demands Congress Impeach Hegseth Now - I agree!

Robert Reich isn’t mincing words anymore. The former Labor Secretary says Pete Hegseth is the most incompetent person in the entire Trump regime, and he’s only counting Trump himself as worse. Reich points to the record. Hegseth pushed for the Iran war when Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and even Tulsi Gabbard warned against it. He’s lied his way through six months of Pentagon chaos. And now Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army and an old friend of Vance’s from law school, just resigned after clashing with him over how badly Hegseth is damaging military modernization. Reich’s answer is simple. If Trump won’t fire him, Congress should impeach him and the Senate should convict. That’s not a fringe position anymore. House Democrats have already filed formal articles of impeachment against Hegseth this year. Progressive groups have sent close to eighteen thousand letters to Congress demanding action. The man running America’s military keeps failing upward while service members pay the price on the ground. At some point accountability has to mean something, or the title Secretary of Defense stops meaning anything at all.

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Does Howard Lutnick’s Family Get Rich Off Your Tariffs?

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick spent the past week screaming at Canada on television. He says Prime Minister Mark Carney blew up “the greatest trade deal in the world” for political reasons. Here’s what he’s not telling you. His own family stands to make billions if the tariffs he’s defending stay in place as long as possible. Before Lutnick joined the cabinet, he ran Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm now run by his sons Brandon and Kyle. Reporting last year revealed Cantor was buying up companies’ tariff refund claims for pennies on the dollar, betting the Supreme Court would eventually strike the tariffs down and pay out in full. In February, the Court did exactly that, ruling six to three that Trump never had the authority to impose those tariffs. The refund pool could top a $170 billion. The longer the tariff chaos drags on, the bigger that payout gets for the family firm. Congress noticed. Jamie Raskin opened an investigation. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden sent their own letters demanding records. So when Lutnick blames Carney for walking away, ask yourself who actually benefits from the deal collapsing. It’s not American steelworkers. It’s not Canadian autoworkers. It’s the Lutnick family bank account, and that should make every one of us furious.

Is America Trading Its Allies for Satellites?

Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf laid out something chilling this week. He wrote that Donald Trump doesn’t believe in allies anymore. He believes in satellites, countries that exist to serve one purpose, obeying whatever Washington demands.Look at the evidence. Trump slashed joint military exercises with South Korea. He’s demanding a veto over which countries Canada can even trade with. He wants first right of refusal on Canada’s natural resources. That’s not partnership. That’s the language of an empire, not an alliance. Wolf compares this moment to the era after World War Two, when leaders like Truman and Marshall built a system of shared power that helped rebuild a shattered world. Trump, Wolf argues, sees all of that as naive. He wants a world where America alone holds the cards and everyone else falls in line or gets left behind. But empires built on fear don’t hold. Allies who feel treated like vassals eventually look for the exit, and once they leave they don’t come back easily. If the United States spends the next few years bullying the very countries that trusted it since 1945, what happens when we actually need them? Power without partnership isn’t strength. It’s isolation wearing a crown.

Trump’s Ag Secretary Invents an Imaginary Kamala Crime Wave

Time for your Crazy Alert, and honestly, this one’s a doozy. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins went on Fox Business and delivered a truly wild bit of alternate history. She told viewers that if Kamala Harris had won in 2024, she would have thrown America’s ranchers in prison. Not fined them. Not regulated them. Imprisoned them. Rollins pointed to a South Dakota ranching family who got hit with federal charges under the Biden administration, charges the Trump administration later dropped. From that one case, Rollins built an entire fictional dystopia where President Harris personally hunts down cattle ranchers over fence lines and irrigation pivots. She didn’t stop there. Rollins also warned darkly about Democrats pushing Americans toward “fake meat” and “lab grown meat,” as if a soy patty at Whole Foods was one election away from replacing the family cattle ranch. Never mind that Trump’s own administration briefly lifted tariffs on imported ground beef last month because prices got so high, a move that drew furious complaints from Republican senators representing actual cattle states. So there you have it. In Brooke Rollins’ imagination, the real threat to American ranching wasn’t record beef prices or tariff chaos. It was a woman who never even got the chance to be president. That’s not agriculture policy. That’s science fiction with a cowboy hat on.

And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, September 3rd, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Gloria Steinem passed today

Gloria Steinem, the indefatigable feminist and journalist whose activism revolutionized the personal and professional lives of women, has died. She was 92. She was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934. Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her, according to a post on her official Instagram page. It did not give a cause of death. Steinem cofounded Ms. Magazine and spent more than half a century as the face of the American women’s movement, fighting for reproductive rights and equal pay. Hillary Clinton said Steinem pushed open doors not just for herself, but for literally millions of women behind her. At a moment when women’s rights are under attack all over again, the best way to honor Gloria Steinem isn’t just to remember her. It’s to organize, the same way she did. God-Speed to you Gloria, you will be missed.

Is Trump secretly spying on journalists and labor unions?

Senator Ron Wyden and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal are demanding an investigation into federal agencies’ use of subpoena power to surveil Americans, calling it institutionalized in brazen abuses of authority. Wyden and Jayapal sent their request to the Government Accountability Office. They want the government watchdog to look into the Trump administration’s use of obscure legal powers to secretly collect records on journalists, nonprofits, and unions without judicial oversight. The Guardian reported this week that Homeland Security Investigations used administrative summonses to secretly obtain six months’ worth of telephone records for a Minneapolis journalist. Privacy experts say the demands for silence attached to these subpoenas aren’t even legally binding, and companies can ignore them. These lawmakers say recipients have a First Amendment right to tell their customers the government came knocking. When federal agencies can quietly vacuum up your phone records and threaten silence on top of it, that’s not law enforcement. That’s a surveillance state built for political payback.

Why is Texas closing 92 polling places right before the midterms?

Republicans on the Tarrant County Commissioners Court voted to slash Election Day polling sites by roughly 30%, leaving the county with 224 sites to serve 1.3 million voters. The NAACP and the ACLU of Texas said the cuts would hit voters of color hardest, since many of the closures are in majority minority areas of Fort Worth and Arlington. Voting rights advocates called the closures the latest chapter in Texas’s long history of suppression. Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico fought the plan, warning “the most powerful people in this country don’t want us to vote easily.” The three Republicans on the commission voted for the cuts. The two Democrats voted against it. This comes as Texas has also suspended more than a million voter registrations statewide. Longer lines and fewer polling places aren’t accidents. They’re a strategy, one our media has been letting slide for years.

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Has CBS News become a Trump propaganda outlet?

Journalist Parker Molloy says CBS ran a hit piece on Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed this week, dredging up old tweets where he compared COVID deaths to the scale of September 11th. The story was tagged First on CBS, but it leaned heavily on a December 2025 piece from the right-wing Washington Free Beacon, which had already tried and failed to make the same tweets a scandal. The National Republican Senatorial Committee wasted no time celebrating the CBS story. Molloy points out CBS’s own reporter made the identical COVID comparison back in 2020, and so did Trump’s own surgeon general. The double standard only kicked in once a Muslim Democrat said it. Under editor Bari Weiss, CBS News keeps finding new ways to do the GOP’s opposition research for free.

Why do only red states get Trump’s disaster money?

Late Tuesday, over the course of an hour, Trump used social media to announce seven disaster relief approvals, for states including Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, South Dakota, and North Dakota. Every announcement came wrapped in praise for a Republican candidate on this November’s ballot. Meanwhile Trump denied disaster relief requests from Rhode Island, Vermont, Illinois, and Maryland, all states he lost. Rhode Island’s congressional delegation says Trump has politicized disaster assistance and made it far harder for blue states to get funding than red ones. When federal disaster aid depends on how your state voted, that’s not emergency management anymore. That’s extortion with a hurricane attached.

Will Trump ever answer for selling pardons?

House Judiciary Democrats released a report this week called “Pardons, Inc.,” documenting what they call a pay-to-play clemency operation running out of the Trump White House. The report includes a detailed spreadsheet. The report says Trump turned the pardon power into a marketplace for insider influence and personal enrichment, where wealthy criminals hire Trump insiders, pour money into his political operation, and the doors of the White House swing open. Democrats say Trump let convicted fraudsters keep close to 1$.7 billion in stolen funds combined. Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht got a pardon on Trump’s first full day back in office, along with forgiveness of more than 1$83 million in forfeitures. This is what happens when accountability has a price tag, and only the people who can pay it get to walk free.

And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, September 3rd, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Did The Post Office Just Build A Machine To Throw Out Your Ballot?

A federal whistleblower says the Postal Service has built a rushed, untested computer system that could keep millions of Americans from ever getting a mail-in ballot this November. The disclosure went to Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and was made public Tuesday. It describes a new federal ballot portal, thrown together in roughly three months, sometimes in defiance of court orders, to carry out Trump’s executive order limiting vote by mail. Here’s the part that should scare you. The system runs on what the whistleblower calls a zero percent failure policy. If one barcode on one ballot in a batch of 10,000 fails to scan, the entire batch gets rejected and shipped back to the state. Blumenthal put it plainly. “The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans,” he told reporters. A federal judge in Boston has temporarily halted the mandate, and 23 states and the District of Columbia are suing. About a third of us vote by mail. If this thing goes live before it works, the ballot you mail may never arrive at all.

Trump’s War On Iran Hits A Wedding, And Iran Fires Back At Our Troops

American warplanes struck near the village of Kuhestak in southern Iran on Tuesday. Iranian officials say the bombs hit a wedding, killing at least five people and wounding more than 60. Central Command denies it targeted civilians. Overnight, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fired missiles and drones at American bases in Jordan, Bahrain, Iraq and Kuwait. Jordan said 13 ballistic missiles crossed into its airspace and 10 were shot down. US officials report no American casualties. Trump’s answer was short. “If they retaliate, they’ll be hit much harder,” he told Fox News. This war started on February 28th, when Trump launched it alongside Israel without ever asking Congress for authorization. Article One of the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. Six months in, we’re bombing wedding parties, our troops sit under Iranian missiles in four countries, and gas is running above $4 a gallon after averaging $3.21 a year ago. Nobody voted for this. The Senate has voted again and again to rein this war in, and Trump has ignored it. A war nobody authorized, with no endgame, and working families pay for it at the pump and with their children.

Is This The Biggest Oil Deal In History Or A Robbery At Gunpoint?

Trump went on social media Friday night and announced what he called the biggest oil deal in world history. The United States, he says, now holds majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves. Here’s what’s underneath the headline. The arrangement reportedly hands the Pentagon a 35 percent stake in a private company holding 100-year leases on 17 Venezuelan oil fields, and gives Washington the right to buy oil at cost. It comes nine months after American forces seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a raid on Caracas and flew him to the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio now effectively runs the country’s finances, and he promises nearly $100 billion in private investment. A Venezuelan economist who teaches at the University of Denver sees it differently. “We’ve replaced gunboat diplomacy now for gunpoint diplomacy,” he said. Think about that. We took a head of state, we installed a government, and then we signed a contract with that government for a fifth of its oil. If another country did that to us, we’d know exactly what to call it. Empire doesn’t stop being empire because somebody drew up paperwork.

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Did Congress Just Punt Its Biggest Fight Until After You Vote?

The House voted Tuesday to extend government funding into December, averting a shutdown in the final stretch of the midterm campaign. The tally was 370 to 48, and it now goes to Trump, who’s expected to sign. That means no shutdown before Election Day, which is exactly the point. Funding would have run out September 30th, and Congress is scheduled to be out of session for nearly all of October so members can campaign at home. So they kicked every hard question past November 3rd. And they are hard questions. Republicans want hundreds of billions more for the military while cutting most non-defense programs. Democrats call that a non-starter. Last year federal workers lived through a record 43-day funding lapse and then a 76-day partial shutdown at Homeland Security. Congress hasn’t finished a single one of the 12 annual spending bills, and the national debt crossed $40 trillion last month. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro reminded her colleagues where the authority sits. “The power of the purse resides within the Congress,” she said. Right now Congress is using that power to dodge a fight until the voting’s over.

Did Massachusetts Just Prove You Can Beat Big Money With Ideas?

Here’s a result the consultants didn’t see coming. Senator Ed Markey won the Massachusetts Democratic Senate primary Tuesday night, beating Congressman Seth Moulton with about two-thirds of the vote. Markey is 80. Moulton is 47. Moulton ran on generational change, an argument that has cost a handful of House Democrats their seats in primaries this year. It didn’t work here, and the money tells you why it should have. Moulton and his allies spent $7.1 million on ads. Markey and his allies spent $3.9 million. Markey got outspent almost two to one and won almost two to one. He didn’t run on his seniority. He ran on the Green New Deal, which he authored, and on Medicare for All, with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren cutting ads for him. On election night he named what happened. “Tonight is a testament to the power of the progressive movement,” Markey said. He faces Republican John Deaton in November. Voters didn’t reject a young candidate. They rejected a vague one. Give people something concrete to vote for and they’ll show up, even against twice the money.

Seattle Teachers Threaten To Walk And Win A Contract Hours Before The Bell

Some good news to close on tonight. In Seattle, 6,000 teachers, paraeducators, counselors and school nurses were ready to walk picket lines this morning instead of opening their classrooms. Late Tuesday night, the district blinked. Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Education Association reached a tentative contract agreement, clearing the way for classes to begin on schedule for about 50,000 students. The union had voted 91% to authorize a strike, after 24 bargaining sessions since June, with special education support, pay and workload the sticking points. Union president Ibijoke Idowu said it plainly before the deal came together. “We don’t want to strike,” she said. They didn’t have to. The threat was enough. The contract still has to be ratified by the membership and the school board, and the district is staring at an $87 million shortfall. But here’s the lesson worth carrying home. Six thousand working people stood together, and a district that spent all summer saying it was broke suddenly found a way. That isn’t magic. That’s leverage, and it still works in 2026.

And that’s the way it is, Today Wednesday, September 2, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Is Putin Arming Iran With Missiles That Can Sink American Warships?

The Financial Times dropped a bombshell overnight. Russia’s been secretly helping Iran build supersonic cruise missiles. An FT investigations team uncovered a multiyear covert program codenamed C430L, and they call it one of the “most significant known transfers of strategic military technology from Moscow to Tehran.” Some of Russia’s most experienced missile specialists are working on it. The goal is a ramjet engine that pushes a cruise missile past several times the speed of sound. Experts say it’s meant for anti-ship missiles. In plain English, weapons built to kill American sailors on American aircraft carriers. Western intelligence already caught Moscow feeding Iran satellite imagery to find our troops. Trump keeps praising Putin, and Putin keeps arming the people shooting at us. What’s up with that?

Why Is Robert Kennedy Junior Citing Studies That Don’t Exist?

A federal judge just caught Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s health department making things up. Judge Christopher Cooper ruled Tuesday that Health and Human Services justified sweeping changes to federal teen pregnancy programs with scientific studies that don’t exist. Cooper wrote that the paperwork cites studies that don’t exist or don’t say what the government claims, calling it “a hallmark of AI-generated citations.” Of seven articles cited, two were completely made up and three weren’t in the journals listed. He blocked the policy. They’d cut tens of millions in grants and wanted the rest steered into abstinence. Two Minnesota counties, Washington state, and Planned Parenthood sued in July. This isn’t the first time. Kennedy’s MAHA report got caught with invented citations too. This is the man running America’s health and he’s building policy on fiction.

Did an Ankle Monitor Kill a 20-Year-Old College Student?

Pierre Damas Bel was 20. He came here in 2024 to join his parents, who’d fled Haiti. He graduated Springfield High with honors and played varsity soccer. Last month he started at Wright State studying neuroscience, because he wanted to be a doctor. Then the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 Haitians. ICE ordered Haitians across southwest Ohio to report in and strapped GPS monitors on them. Bel got his July 29th. He wrote online that he’d come here to study, not to hurt anyone, and that he felt a shame he never imagined. Classmates teased him. He begged ICE twice to take it off. Monday morning he called his father, said he wasn’t okay, and took his own life on Interstate 70. His father says his son “felt like he was treated like an animal.” Even Governor Mike DeWine called it a tragedy and the federal operation misguided. A kid who wanted to be a doctor is dead because this government decided he was a threat.

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ICE Is Holding a Dying 76-Year-Old Man. Why?

Loreto Javar is 76 and he has stage four prostate cancer. He’s a legal permanent resident, 31 years in this country, a retired hotel worker in Fife, Washington. On June 23rd he went to his citizenship interview and ICE arrested him on the spot. He’s been locked in the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma ever since. He’s missed two cancer appointments, and he’ll miss a third because his hearing got pushed back another month. His daughter says his meals come late, which throws off the two oral medications keeping him alive. ICE says he failed to disclose a 1970s conviction in the Philippines when he applied for his visa in 1995. He told them he served three years and was paroled. He’s renewed his green card over and over without a problem, most recently in December. His daughter Daisy says “he’s been following all the rules, paying his taxes, everything.” ICE is reaching back half a century to justify letting an old man die in a cell.

Trump Cut Down the Trees Planted to Mourn a Murdered President

Forty weeping willows lined the terraces of the Kennedy Center. They weren’t decoration. Landscape architect Dan Kiley put them in the original 1965 plan, mournful trees for a country grieving a president shot down in Dallas. Now they’re stumps. The video went viral this week, though the cutting happened in October. The Kennedy Center says the willows were decaying and came out for safety, and that they’re replaced regularly. But the same judge who caught Kennedy’s fake studies noted that preservation officials called those willows “key contributors” to the building’s historic character. Trump took over that board last year and had the gold columns painted white. He also cleared historic trees at a Potomac golf course before he had permission. He’s erasing a memorial one tree at a time.

MapQuest Told Trump No, and America Made It Number One

Remember MapQuest? The site you printed directions from in 1996? Last week Trump signed an order renaming Lake Ontario Lake America in the middle of his trade fight with Canada. Google Maps rolled over that weekend. Apple got calls from the President himself and made the change late Monday. MapQuest posted four words. “We’re not changing it.” The app shot to number one free app in the whole Apple store, ahead of ChatGPT. Half a million downloads, and usage running 50 times normal. Only 14% of Americans wanted it renamed anyway. Turns out you just can’t order a country to forget the name of a lake - just for revenge...

And that’s the way it is, Today Wednesday, September 2, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Trump’s Iran War Drains $1,200 From Every American Household

Six months into Donald Trump’s war with Iran, we finally have a price tag for regular people. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, figures the typical American household has paid an extra $1,200 since the shooting started in February. New Yorker columnist John Cassidy pulled the numbers together, and he says even that’s conservative. He called the figure a rough sketch of “the magnitude of Trump’s folly.” Here’s where your money went. Gas is up more than a dollar a gallon. Diesel is up by half. Brown University’s energy tracker says those two things alone have cost Americans $93 billion, better than $700 a household. Oil and fertilizer climbed, so groceries climbed. Inflation went from 2.4 percent in February to 3.4 percent today, and that killed the interest rate cuts everybody was counting on. Your car loan costs more because of this war. Meanwhile the Pentagon can’t keep its story straight. Hegseth told the Senate it’s cost $37.5 billion. NBC News reported internal Pentagon numbers between $80 billion and $100 billion. Somebody’s covering that gap, and it isn’t the defense contractors.

Why Is Hegseth Mocking Canadian Teenagers While His Army Falls Apart?

Monday night, hours after his Army secretary walked out the door, the Secretary of Defense got on social media and posted a photo he’d lifted off the Instagram page of a cadet camp in Vernon, British Columbia. It showed a smiling teenage girl receiving a medal from her instructor. His entire caption was a Canadian flag and the words “this is real.” By Tuesday it had over five million views. Canada’s cadet program is for kids aged 12 to 18. They aren’t soldiers. The instructor isn’t on combat duty. The Secretary of Defense of the United States body shamed a high school kid in front of millions of followers. Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman and an Air National Guard officer, said plainly that these are children. Alberta’s Shannon Phillips brought up the 158 Canadians who died fighting alongside Americans in Afghanistan and told him, “Have some respect, you absolute lowlife.” And look at the backdrop. The Army has 450,000 active duty soldiers, no confirmed civilian secretary, and fewer generals than at any point in recent memory. The man running it is posting memes taking cheap shots about children.

Wyden and Jayapal Demand Answers on Trump’s Secret Spy Program

Two members of Congress want a federal investigation into how this administration has been spying on Americans. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington have asked the Government Accountability Office to examine Homeland Security’s use of administrative summonses, a customs tool, to seize phone records and online data belonging to journalists, nonprofits and labor unions. No judge signs off. Nobody tells the target. The case that set this off involves Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist. Homeland Security Investigations pulled six months of her phone records. Then agents went to Google demanding information on the YouTube accounts of Fort and Don Lemon. A judge had already rejected a warrant for that same material twice, ruling the journalists deserved a chance to fight it in court. So the government simply walked around the judge. Every one of these summonses instructs the company receiving it to keep quiet. Big tech firms with lawyers sometimes ignore that. Telecoms, banks and pharmacies just comply. AT&T and CVS have told Congress that’s precisely why they never notified their own customers. When the government can read your records and nobody’s permitted to tell you, the Fourth Amendment is decoration.

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Can Carney Make Trump Stop Throwing Shade and Start Talking?

Canada’s had enough. Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in front of reporters in Ottawa Tuesday morning and told the Trump administration to grow up. Talks can resume, he said, when the Americans “start being serious about having those discussions.” Negotiations collapsed August 21st after Ottawa called the American demands unacceptable. Trump answered with 50% tariffs on roughly $28 billion in Canadian goods, everything from beer and cheese to hockey equipment, piled on top of existing duties on steel, aluminum, lumber and cars. Canada hits back September 8th, dollar for dollar, on $27.6 billion of American products, and Ottawa’s putting up another $7.5 billion to protect its own workers. Carney says Washington wanted Canadian industry either turned into subsidiaries of American companies or wound down entirely. Since the talks died, Trump has declared Lake Ontario should be renamed Lake America and posted an AI meme of Canadian geese wearing his hairstyle. Scott Bessent went on television and joked about Canada’s submarines. Carney said that’s beneath their office. Monday, Canadian voters handed his Liberals all three special elections, including a seat conservatives had held for eight years. Bullying our closest ally is uniting them, not breaking them.

Why Did the CDC Erase Two Measles Deaths From the National Count?

Now here’s the one that ought to make you furious. On August 25th, Pennsylvania’s health department confirmed two measles deaths in Lancaster County. Both people were unvaccinated. They’re the first measles deaths in that state in 35 years, and the state health secretary, a pediatrician with three decades of experience, personally reviewed the investigation. The CDC won’t count them. New CDC director Erica Schwartz made the decision to leave both deaths out of the national tally, according to officials who spoke to the Washington Post anonymously because they’re afraid of being fired. So the CDC’s own website still shows zero measles deaths in the United States this year, with an asterisk saying the agency is reviewing the circumstances. Understand what just happened. States have always made these determinations. That’s the system. A former CDC chief medical officer called the move “highly unusual.” And it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Robert F. Kennedy Junior went on a Fox News town hall and referred to the so called measles deaths in Lancaster County. He suggested online the whole thing might have been invented by a staffer working for Governor Josh Shapiro. We’re at 2,903 cases across 45 states, the worst outbreak in more than three decades. In November, international health officials decide whether America still qualifies as measles free. And Washington’s response is to hold the death count at zero. That isn’t public health. That’s public relations with a body count, and children are paying for it.

Librarians Face Bomb Threats as Censorship Hits a Breaking Point

PEN America released a report today called Out of Circulation, and it finds America’s public libraries at a breaking point. Not school libraries. Public ones. The place your grandmother gets her large print mysteries. The report documents bomb threats, organized protests, and a physical assault on a librarian that shut down story hours in New York, Massachusetts and Nevada. It counts nearly 23,000 book bans in school libraries since 2021, and now 51% of every attempted ban in this country targets a public library. Idaho passed a law in March letting city councils hire and fire library directors, a power that belonged to library boards. Alabama tried to let officials remove board members without cause. In Arkansas, one librarian’s manager set aside bail money, because a state law could put her in jail for a year for handing a kid the wrong book. A federal appeals court let that law take effect in July. Kasey Meehan of PEN America says libraries are “increasingly censorship battlegrounds.” A library card is one of the last things in America that’s free and open to everybody. That’s exactly why they’re coming for it.

And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, September 1st, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Does The Pentagon’s New Iran Plan Buy Us a Forever War?

Axios reports Central Command has handed the White House a plan for repeated limited strikes on Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. One official described the goal as mowing the lawn, keeping Iran from rebuilding radar, air defenses and anti-ship missiles. Pete Hegseth backed the plan and sent it to Trump days ago. The White House had been leaning against it until Iran hit American bases in Jordan Sunday. Analyst Trita Parsi didn’t mince words. “To periodically bomb a country is to fight a forever war.” Trump promised voters he’d end endless wars. Now his Pentagon is drawing up a permanent bombing schedule for a country of ninety million people. Every one of those strikes costs money that could’ve built schools here, and every one creates the next generation of people who hate us. That’s not a strategy, just an endless war….

Army Secretary Quits And Blows Open Hegseth’s Purge

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned Monday night after 18 months on the job. Trump accepted it. The White House praised him and refused to say why he’s leaving. Everybody in Washington knows why. Driscoll spent months fighting War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’s fired or forced out more than two dozen senior officers, including Army Chief of Staff Randy George in April with no explanation. The Navy secretary walked in April. The Army’s commander in Europe stepped down in June. Hegseth also ordered Driscoll to remove his own top adviser. Reuters reported Driscoll raised concerns that Hegseth was blocking Army readiness by firing the generals running it. Driscoll was a Yale law classmate of JD Vance and Trump’s own envoy on Ukraine. If he can’t survive Hegseth, nobody can. That’s how you hollow out the military and make it weak.

Did Bari Weiss Order A Headline That Smears A Muslim Candidate?

CBS News ran a story Monday tying Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, to the September 11 attacks. The evidence? Two deleted posts. In one he compared the Covid death toll to the nearly 3,000 killed on 9/11 and called for the same national mobilization. In the other he mourned everyone who died in the War on Terror that followed. He has denounced those attacks again and again. Oliver Darcy reports CBS editor Bari Weiss praised the piece in the morning meeting and personally directed the headline to mention 9/11. Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari called it an “insane, blatantly racist headline.” Rashida Tlaib said the targeting is coordinated. Staffers complained to standards and got nowhere. This is what happens when a billionaire hands a newsroom to an ideologue. Cronkite’s network is now running opposition research on a Muslim candidate.

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Supreme Court Clears Trump’s Ballroom Its Own Chief Calls Unlawful

The Supreme Court ruled five to four Monday that Trump can keep building his ballroom on the ruins of the East Wing. The majority didn’t say the project’s legal. They said the National Trust for Historic Preservation has no standing to sue. Chief Justice John Roberts dissented along with the three liberals, writing that construction of the ballroom is likely unlawful because Congress never approved it. Federal law bars building on that parkland without congressional authorization. The price tag runs somewhere between $300 to $400 million dollars, and every lower court that looked at it called the project unlawful. Trump celebrated on social media. A watchdog put it plainly. “The White House belongs to the people.” Trump tore down a piece of it anyway, and five justices decided nobody has the right to object. Sad

Do Trump’s Secret Drug Deals Actually Cut Your Prescription Bill?

Trump stood in the Oval Office Monday and announced nine more drug pricing deals, bringing the total to 26 companies. He called it the largest price reduction in the history of medicine. Here’s what he didn’t say. The deals are voluntary. The terms are secret. They mostly cover Medicaid, where deep discounts already exist, and states can choose whether to participate. Public Citizen found that all 16 companies in the first round turned around and raised list prices on 272 drugs this year. Peter Maybarduk called the new deals a distraction from a failed plan. Merith Basey of Patients for Affordable Drugs said what’s needed instead. “Patients need systemic reforms that will lower drug prices.” Americans still pay roughly four times what other wealthy countries pay. Holding press conferences in the Oval Office doesn’t change that.

Trump Carves Off A Piece Of Yosemite For A Developer

For more than a year the National Park Service has been quietly working to hand a quarter-mile strip of Yosemite to a Nevada developer. NOTUS reports Kingsbarn Realty Capital wants a road for direct park access to the 83 acres it owns next door. Abraham Lincoln signed a law in 1864 saying Yosemite would be inalienable for all time. Rebecca Solnit writes that the country’s being sold for parts. She’s right. Trump’s also funneling park money to his own projects in Washington while spending outside the capital fell 68% this fiscal year. Public lands are the one thing every American owns together, rich or poor. Once a piece of Yosemite has a price tag, so does everything else. Our “commons” Yosemite should not be on the chopping block.

And that’s the way it is, Today is Tuesday, September 1st, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

Driscoll quits Hegseth’s purge

Bari Weiss smears a Muslim candidate

The Court clears Trump’s ballroom

Secret pharma deals

Yosemite carved up